Canada in the spotlight as the UN selects Montreal for COP-15 this December

The last ten thousand years have been a period of unusual stability for the Earth’s climate, giving us the opportunity to rise above the conditions of life that had largely prevailed for our species for the previous forty thousand generations.  But now, our success threatens the very thing that gave birth to our civilization.  We face nothing less than the collapse of the living world.  In fact, it can be argued that the Holocene epoch that has been so benevolent to our kind has now evolved into something else entirely – what many have termed the Anthropocene.  

The new term is still unofficial – we still reside in the Holocene – but there can be no doubt that human activity has fundamentally altered the state of this planet.    

Many things will need to happen for us to restore stability to our biosphere, and among them is that we reverse the decline in biodiversity.  This challenge goes much beyond simply saving threatened and endangered species from extinction.  It  also means “rewilding” the world.  We can look at it one of two ways – a catastrophe to avoid, or an opportunity to significantly enrich our world, with all the attendant benefits that will come with that.  The option we don’t have is to sit back and wait for awhile, as the decision will be made for us, and we’re not going to like it.

World leaders will be meeting this December 5 – 17 in Montreal, Canada, for the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 15).  This will be a critical part of a process we hope will result in a negotiated biodiversity agreement at the international level.  One that could be vital to determining the fate of endangered species all over the world.  To all species, in fact, because this is one case where we all will either succeed or fail together.   We’d like you to be aware of this conference because it has the potential to be a hugely important moment for our planet – in large part because the window to act won’t be open much longer.  In the months leading up to COP 15 we need to raise our voices and to pressure our leaders to come to the meeting incented and prepared to act.  We need them to know that we’ll settle for nothing less than bold and effective protections for our biodiversity.  We also will need meaningful metrics against which to measure how we’re doing in the all-important next few years ahead.  Ideally, what comes out of this will go as far as to put in place an international framework to hold accountable those whose actions inflict a toll on the planet’s biodiversity, be they businesses or governments.  This would not be totally unprecedented.  We’ve already seen a number of landmark decisions aimed at protecting human rights using such a mechanism.  An example was a recent case in the Philippines in which Greenpeace and a number of allied organizations succeeded in making some of that nation’s big polluters liable for the human cost of their environmental damage.  Another is a recent vote by the City of Vancouver to fund a class-action lawsuit against petroleum producers for climate-related costs.

Biodiversity is deteriorating worldwide and this decline will worsen with business-as-usual.  We urgently need broad-based action to transform our society’s relationship with the natural world.  Diversity in the number and types of biological organisms is essential to the processes that support all life on Earth, most certainly including ours.  Without a wide range of animals, plants and microorganisms, we cannot have healthy ecosystems.  The same systems that provide us with clean air to breathe, the food we eat, and so many of our medicines.  

In fact, it’s impossible to imagine how we go on without even a single piece of the whole, and still have a functioning system.  The bees and other insects that function as pollinators.  Microbes in the soil.  Phytoplankton at the basis of ocean food chains.  Sharks at the apex!  Wetlands and forests that help the soil absorb rainfall and prevent flooding.  Coral reefs and mangrove forests that protect coastlines.   We need all of it.  No part of the whole is expendable.  We have to save all of nature, in all of its amazing diversity.  Or we face the very real risk of losing all of it.

What is the scale of biodiversity loss?

This can be deceiving, so don’t be fooled – the urgency is much greater than it may first appear on its face.  

The list of known recent extinctions is still a small fraction of all species on the planet.  According to the UN, “Since 1500, 1.6% of birds, 1.9% of mammals and 2.2% of amphibians have been recorded as extinct.”  That may not seem like a lot.  Compared to the millions of species known to presently exist, we’re talking about “711 vertebrates, and around 600 invertebrates and plants known to have gone extinct” since that date.  But then they go on to say that the actual number is “likely to be considerably greater”.   

There are a number of reasons for this.  For example, we primarily see the impact on the most visible species, but we miss large numbers that are closer to the basis of the food chain.  Also, when entire habitats are wiped out (especially in, but not limited to, tropical regions), countless species we haven’t yet identified are lost.  We know this is happening, but it’s extremely difficult to quantify what’s been taken from us.

Even more threatening, I believe, is what we’ve done to the overall populations of most of our remaining wildlife.  Though many are still hanging on, virtually all of them have been reduced to a fraction of the numbers they had even just fifty years ago.  I could cite one example after another for some time, but let’s just take it at a general level.  The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2020 reported that animal populations they assessed “decreased by an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016.”  That should be enough to terrify anybody.

As we continue to reduce the amount of available habitat (which also has the highly detrimental effect of isolating individual populations), we risk pushing large numbers of species past the brink.  Again from the UN: “Between 1990 and 2020, around 420 million hectares of forest (mainly tropical forest) has been lost and a further 10 million hectares, an area the size of Scotland and Wales combined, is being lost each year.”  It’s therefore unsurprising that the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s systematic assessments of key groups of plants and animals finds that “In all cases the reassessments show an increasing trend in the proportion of species that are threatened.”  They predict that extinction rates are likely to increase “more than ten-fold” over the next few decades.

At some point, someone is likely to remind you that extinctions have always happened, and that more than 99% of the species that have ever existed are now gone.  This is true.  However, that’s over timelines measured in millions to hundreds-of-millions of years.  Not since 1970, or 1500, or even the ten thousand or so years since we started all this.  The baseline extinction rate through Earth’s history is less than 1% of what it is today.  In fact, what we’re seeing right now could qualify as the world’s sixth mass-extinction event.  For perspective, the fifth one was about sixty-five million years ago.

Bottom line – business-as-usual will have catastrophic effects on our biodiversity.  We’re looking at the potential for a compounding rate of species loss as the effects of previous extinctions cascade.  Prompt action now can still prevent the worst effects, and we can keep most of what we really value in nature.  But it won’t be easy.  And we don’t have time to wait.

A biosphere with a high degree of diversity is much more resilient in the face of a rapidly changing environment, such as the one our climate is imposing on us now.  But the populations we’ve so severely diminished over the last fifty years will be under greater pressure as the changing climate alters habitats and triggers more frequent extreme weather events.  Invasive species are another factor, as our highly mobile civilization introduces them into places they don’t belong at an ever increasing rate, placing significantly more pressure on species native to that habitat.       

The time is right for a renewed focus on biodiversity.  We should seize this opportunity to make COP 15 a watershed moment.  Remind your elected representatives that this matters to you, and let’s be prepared to meet this moment.

In the meantime, we can demand a little better of ourselves and recognize that every last bit of our remaining wildlife matters.  All of it is precious and infinitely valuable and worth protecting.  Remember that if we measure by weight all the mammals on Earth right now, 96% is us, our pets and our livestock.  If we value our own futures, we’ll want to act with urgency to protect the remaining 4% that we can still call ‘wild’.  If we act wisely now, we can build towards a day when much of the world has returned to wilderness, and we will have resumed our proper place in it.     

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Phil and the Canadian Cetacean Alliance Team